A^^Ihe social significance 




OUR INSTITUTIONS 



AN R A i" I N 



DELIVERED BY REQUEST OF THE CITIZENS AT NEWPORT, R. I. 



July 4TH, 1861. 



By henry JAMES 



BOSTON: 
TICK NOR AND FIELDS 
1861. 




Gass tH 2 ^ 
Book .H'<i)7 



\?(^ 



THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE 



OUR INSTITUTIONS: 



AN ORATION 



DELIVERED BY REQUEST OF THE CITIZENS AT NEWPORT, R. I. 



July 4TH, 1861. 



By henry JAMES 



BOSTON: 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS 

1861. 






[The Oration as printed contains several passages omitted in the delivery. 



^Vfo 



7? 



University Press, Cambridge : 
Printed by Wclrh, Bigolow, and Company. 



ORAT ION. 



A FRIEND observed to me a few days since, as I ac- 
cepted the invitation with which your Committee of 
Arrangements has honored me, to officiate as your 
orator on this occasion, that I could hardly expect, 
under the circumstances, to regale my auditors with 
the usual amount of spread-eagleism. I replied, that 
that depended upon what he meant by spread-eagle- 
ism. If he meant what was commonly meant by it, 
namely, so clearly defined a Providential destiny for 
our Union, that, do what we please, we shall never 
fall short of it, I could never, under any circum- 
stances, the most opposed even to existing ones, con- 
sent to flatter my hearers with that unscrupulous 
rubbish. No doubt many men, whose consciences 
have been drugged by our past political prosperity, 
do fancy some such inevitable destiny as this before 
us, — do fancy that we may become so besotted with 
the lust of gain as to permit the greatest rapacity 
on the part of our public servants, the most undis- 
guised and persistent corruption on the part of our 
municipal and private agents, without forfeiting the 
Providential favor. From that sort of spread-eagle- 



ism I told my friend that I hoped we were now un- 
dergoing a timely and permanent deliverance. But 
if he meant by that uncouth word an undiminished, 
yea, a heightened confidence in our political sanity 
and vigor, and in the fresh and glowing manhood 
which is to be in yet larger measure than ever the 
legitimate fruit of our institutions, I could assure 
him that my soul was full of it, and it would be 
wholly my fiiult if my auditors did not feelingly re- 
spond to it. 

1 never felt proud of my country for what 
many seem to consider her prime distinction, name- 
ly, her ability to foster the rapid accumulation 
of private wealth. It does not seem to me a 
particularly creditable thing, that a greater number 
of people annually grow richer under our institu- 
tions than they do anywhere else. It is a fact, 
no doubt, and like all facts has its proper amiable 
signification when exposed to the rectifying light 
of Truth. But it is not the fact which in a foreign 
land, for example, has made my heart to throb and 
my cheeks to glow when I remembered the great 
and happy people beyond the sea, when I thought 
of the vast and fertile land that lay blossoming 
and beckoning to all mankind beyond the setting 
sun. For there in Europe one sees this same pri- 
vate wealth, in less diffused form, it is true, con- 
centrated in greatly fewer hands, but at the same 
time associated in many cases with things that go 
every way to dignify it or give it a lustre not 
its own, — associated with traditional family refine- 



ment, with inoffensive unostentatious manners, with 
the practice of art and science and literature, and 
sometimes with the pursuit of toilsome and hon- 
orable personal adventure. Every one knows, on 
the other hand, how little ive exact from our rich 
men ; how meagre and mean and creeping a race 
we permit our rich men to be, if their meanness 
is only flavored with profusion. I have not been 
favored with a great many rich acquaintance, but 
still I have known a not inconsiderable number, 
and I have never found them the persons to whom 
one would spontaneously resort in his least per- 
sonal moments, or communicate with the most 
naturally in his hours of the purest intellectual 
elation or despondency. Of course I have known 
exceptions to this rule, men whose money only 
serves to illustrate their superior human sweet- 
ness, men of whose friendship everybody is proud. 
But as a general thing, nevertheless, one likes best 
to introduce one's foreign acquaintance, not to our 
commercial nabobs, who aggravate the price of 
house-rent and butcher's meat so awfully to us poor 
Newporters ; not to our fast financiers and bank 
cashiers, who on a salary of three thousand a year 
contrive to support in luxury, beside their proper 
wife and offspring, a dozen domestic servants and 
as many horses ; but to our, in the main, upright, 
self-respecting, and, if you please, untutored, but 
at the same time unsophisticated, children of toil, 
who are the real fathers and mothers of our fu- 
ture distinctive manhood. 



6 



No ; what makes one's pulse to bound when 
he remembers his own home under foreign skies, 
is never the rich man, nor the learned man, nor 
the distinguished man of any sort who illustrates 
its history, for in all these petty products almost 
every country may favorably, at all events te- 
diously, compete with our own ; but it is all simply 
the abstract manhood itself of the country, man 
himself unqualified by convention, the man to 
whom all these conventional men have been simply 
introductory, the man who — let me say it — for 
the first time in human history finding himself in 
his own right erect under God's sky, and feeling 
himself in his own right the peer of every other 
man, spontaneously aspires and attains to a far 
freer and profounder culture of his nature than 
has ever yet illustrated humanity. 

Shallow people call this pretension of ours the 
offspring of national vanity, and stigmatize it as 
implying the greatest immodesty in every one 
who asserts it. Is it not the same as saying, 
they ask, that ignorance is as good as experience, 
weakness as good as skill, nature as good as cul- 
ture, the crude ore as good as the polished metal 
which is extracted from it? I will show you the 
absurdity of this criticism in a few moments, when 
I show you the peculiar foundation which the sen- 
timent in question, the sentiment of human equal- 
ity, claims in our historic evolution and growth. 
For the present, I have a word more to say in 
regard to the contrasts of European and American 
thought and aspiration. 



No American, who is not immersed in abject 
spread-eagleism, — that is to say, no American 
who has had the least glimpse of the rich social 
promise of our institutions, or of the free play 
they accord to the spiritual activities of our na- 
ture, — values the mere political prestige of his 
nation, or the repute it enjoys with other nations, 
as the true ground of its glory. Much less, of 
course, does he esteem the mere personnel of his 
government as conferring any distinction upon him. 
Loyalty, which is a strictly personal sentiment, has 
long given place even in the English bosom where 
it was native, to j)atriotism, which is a much more 
rational sentiment. Loyalty bears to patriotism 
the same relation that superstition bears to relig- 
ion. The zealot worships God, not as an infinite 
Spirit of Love, but as a finite person : not for what 
He is inwardly in himself, but for what He may 
outwardly be to the worshipper. He adores him, 
not for what alone renders him worthy of adora- 
tion, namely, his essential humanity, that infinitely 
tender sympathy with his infirm creature which 
leads him forever to humble himself that the lat- 
ter may be exalted, but simply because he is 
eminent in place and power above all beings, and 
so is able to do all manner of kindness to those 
who please him, and all manner of unkindness to 
those who displease him. Exactly so the loyalist 
worships his king or his queen, — not for their ra- 
diant human worth; not for the uses their great 
dignity promotes to the common or associated life ; 



8 



in short, not from any rational perception of their 
inward adjustment to the place they occupy; but 
simply because they do occupy that eminent place, 
simply because they happen to be crowned king 
and crowned queen, traditional sources of honor 
and dishonor to their subjects. In both cases alike, 
the homage is purely blind or instinctive, and, 
though befitting children, is unworthy of adult 
men. Eeligion, on the contrary, clothes the Di- 
vine supremacy with essentially spiritual attributes, 
makes His perfection the perfection of character, the 
perfection of love and wisdom, and of power thence 
alone energized, so that no religious man wor- 
ships God from choice or voluntarily, but spontane- 
ously, or because he cannot help himself, so much 
does the overpowering loveliness constrain him. 
That is to say, every man truly worships God in 
the exact measure of his own unaffected goodness, 
purity, and truth. And it is thus precisely that 
the patriot loves his king or queen, — not for their 
traditional sanctity, not for their exalted privilege, 
not for their conventional remoteness, in short, from 
other men, — but for their willing nearness to them, 
that is, for their positive human use or worth, and 
consequent fitness to lead the great honest hearts 
they represent. In one word, what the patriot sees 
and loves in his king is his country and his country 
only ; and he serves him, therefore, as the spir- 
itually enlightened man serves God, not with a 
ceremonial or ritual devotion, but with a cordial 
or living one, with a service which only exalts, 



9 



instead of any longer degrading, either of the par- 
ties to it. 

No wonder, then, that the sentiment of loyalty 
should have utterly died out of our blood, when 
even that higher sentiment of country, to which 
alone it ministered in the bosom of our Ensrlish 
ancestry, has in its turn given place in o«r bosoms 
to a sentiment still higher, that of humanity. We 
are the descendants, not of English loyalists by any 
means, but of English patriots exclusively ; that is, 
of men who valued royalty only so long as it served 
the common life, and when it grew tired of that 
service, and claimed only to be served in its turn, 
unhesitatingly suspended it by the neck, and sent 
its descendants skipping. And this English patri- 
otism, which was itself a regenerate loyalty, or a 
love of country purified of all personal allegiance, 
has itself become glorified in our veins into a still 
grander sentiment, — that is, from a love of country 
has become exalted into a love of humanity. It is 
the truest glory any nation may boast, that the love 
it enkindles in the bosom of its children is the 
love of man himself; that the respect it engenders 
there for themselves is identical with the respect 
which is due to all men. As Americans, we love 
our country, it is true, but not because it is ours 
simply; on the contrary, we are proud to belong 
to it, because it is the country of all mankind, 
because she opens her teeming lap to the exile 
of every land, and bares her hospitable breast to 
whatsoever wears the human form. This is where 

2 



10 



the ordinary European mind inevitably fails to do 
us any justice. The purblind piddling mercenaries 
of literature, like Dickens, and the ominous scribes 
and Pharisees of the Saturday Review,* have just 
enough of cheap wit to see and caricature the 
cordial complacency we feel in our virgin and beau- 
tiful mother; but it takes an acumen bred of no 
London police-courts, and an education of the heart 
which all the studies of Oxford will never yield, 
to see the rich human soul that vivifies that com- 
placency, that burns away all its dross, and makes 
it laughable only to literary louts and flunkies who 
live by pandering to the prejudices of the average 
human understanding. 

The American misses in European countries and 
institutions this exquisite human savor, this ex- 
quisite honor which is due to man alone, and this 
exquisite indifference which is due to persons. In 
European institutions, — I do not say in existing 
European sentiment, for that, no doubt, is greatly in 
advance of the institutions, — but in European in- 
stitutions persons are everything and man compar- 
atively nothing. It is always the skilled man, or 
the learned man, or the mighty man, or the noble 
man, in short the propertied or qualified man of 
some sort, that is had in reverence ; never our 
common humanity itself, which, on the contrary, 
is starved in garrets in order that the man of qual- 
ity may live in plenty, is ground to powder by 
toil in order to keep up his iniquitous state, is 

* See Appendix A. 



11 



butchered in crowds to maintain his peace, and 
rots in prisons to avouch his purity. Abroad every 
American sees, of course and accordingly, any 
amount of merely political energy and efficiency, 
sees governments flourishing by the permanent 
demoralization of their people. He sees every ap- 
pliance of luxurious art, all manner of imposing 
edifices, of elaborate gardens and pleasure-places, 
the deadliest arsenals of war, armies innumerable, 
and navies disciplined with infernal force, all con- 
secrated to the sole purpose of keeping up the 
purely political status of the country, or aggrandiz- 
ing its own selfish aims and repute to the eyes of 
other nations and its own people. And he cries 
aloud to his own heart. May America perish out 
of all remembrance, before what men blasphemous- 
ly call public order finds itself promoted there by 
this costly human degradation ! Disguise it as you 
will in your own weak, wilful way, in no country 
in Europe has the citizen as yet consciously risen 
into the man. In no country of Europe does the 
government consciously represent, or even so much 
as affect to represent, the unqualified manhood of 
the country, its lustrous human worth, the honest 
imadulterate blood of its myriad beautiful and lov- 
ing bosoms, its fathers and mothers, its brothers 
and sisters, its sons and daughters, its husbands 
and wives, its lovers and friends, every throb of 
whose life is sacred with God's sole inspiration ; 
but only the adulterate streams which course 
through the veins of some insignificant conven- 



12 



tional aristocracy. Take England itself for an ex- 
ample of the perfect truth of my allegations. We 
may easily do injustice to England just now ; may 
easily forget the shining and proud pre-eminence 
which belongs to her political development among 
all the polities of the earth. Another nation so 
great, so vowed in its political form to freedom, so 
renowned for arms, for art, for industry, for the 
intelligence of its scholars, for its public and pri- 
vate morality, does not illustrate human annals ; 
and yet, because she now thinks of herself before 
she thinks of us, because she listens to the prayer 
of her starving operatives before she listens to 
the demands of our betrayed nationality, we are 
ready to forget her glorious past, and pronounce 
her a miracle of selfishness. But no truly human 
virtue is compatible with an empty stomach ; and 
England, like everybody else, must be allowed first 
of all to secure her own subsistence before she 
bestows a thought upon other people. I will not 
blame England, then, for her present timidity. I 
will never forget the inappreciable services she has 
rendered to the cause of political progress. But 
just as little can I be blind to the immense limita- 
tions she exhibits when measured by American 
humanitary ideas. She claims to be the freest of 
European nations ; and so she is, as I have already 
admitted, so far as her public or political life is 
concerned. But viewed internallj^, viewed as to 
her social condition, you observe such a destitution 
of personal freedom and ease and courtesy among 



13 

her children as distinguishes no other people, and 
absolutely shocks an American. Conventional rou- 
tine, a wholly artificial morality, has so bitten it- 
self into the life of the people, into the national 
manners and countenance even, that the kindly 
human heart within is never allowed to come to 
the surface, and what accordingly is meant among 
them for civility to each other is so coldly and 
grudgingly rendered as to strike the stranger like 
insult. The intensely artificial structure of society 
in England renders it inevitable in fact, that her 
people should be simply the worst-mannered people 
in Christendom. Indeed, I venture to say that no 
average American resides a year in England with- 
out getting a sense so acute and stifling of its hid- 
eous class-distinctions, and of the consequent awk- 
wardness and bnisqiierie of its upper classes, and the 
consequent abject snobbery or inbred and ineradi- 
cable servility of its lower classes, as makes the 
manners of Choctaws and Potawatamies sweet and 
christian, and gives to a log-cabin in Oregon the 
charm of comparative dignity and peace. 

For, after all, what do we prize in men? Is it 
their selfish or social worth? Is it their personal 
or their human significance ? Unquestionably, only 
the latter. All the refinement, all the accomplish- 
ment, all the power, all the genius under heaven, 
is only a nuisance to us if it minister to individual 
vanity, or be associated with a sentiment of aloof- 
ness to the common life, to the great race which 
bears us upon her spotless bosom and nourishes 



14 



us with the milk of her own immortahty. What 
is the joy we feel when we see the gifted man, 
the man of genius, the man of high conventional 
place of whatever sort, come down to the recogni- 
tion of the lowliest social obligations, — what is it 
but a testimony that the purest personal worth is 
then most pure when it denies itself, when it leaps 
over the privileged interval which separates it from 
the common life, and comes down to identify itself 
with the commonest? This sentiment of human 
unity, of the sole original sacredness of man and 
the purely derivative sanctity of persons, no matter 
who they are, is tvhat ive are horn to, and what we 
must not fail to assert with an emphasis and good- 
will which may, if need be, make the world re- 
sound. For it is our very life, the absolute breath 
of our nostrils, which alone qualifies us to exist. 
I lived, recently, nearly a year in St. John's Wood 
in London, and was daily in the habit of riding 
down to the city in the omnibus along with my 
immediate neighbors, men of business and profes- 
sional men, who resided in that healthy suburb, and 
fared forth from it every morning to lay up honest, 
toilsome bread for the buxom domestic angels who 
sanctified their homes, and the fair-haired cherubs 
who sweetened them. Very nice men, to use their 
own lingo, they were, for the most part ; tidy, un- 
pretending, irreproachable in dress and deportment ; 
men in whose truth and honesty you would confide 
at a glance ; and yet, after eight months' assiduous 
bosom solicitation of their hardened stolid visages. 



15 



I never was favored with the sHghtest overture to 
human mtercourse from one of them. I never once 
caught the eye of one of them. If ever I came nigh 
doing so, an instant film would surge up from their 
more vital parts, if such parts there we^-e, just as a 
Newport fog suddenly surges up from the cold re- 
morseless sea, and wrap the organ in the dullest, fish- 
iest, most disheartening of stares. They took such 
extreme pains never to look kt one another, that I 
knew they must be living men, devoutly intent each 
on disowning the other's life ; otherwise I could 
well have believed them so many sad well-seasoned 
immortals, revisiting their old London haunts by 
way of a nudge to their present less carnal satisfac- 
tions. I had myself many cherished observations to 
make upon the weather, upon the lingering green 
of the autumn fields, upon the pretty suburban cot- 
tages we caught a passing glimpse of, upon the end- 
less growth of London, and other equally conservative 
topics ; but I got no chance to ventilate them, and 
the poor things died at last of hope deferred. The 
honest truth is what Dr. Johnson told Boswell, that 
the nation is deficient in the human sentiment. 
"Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "though himself a stern, 
true-born Englishman, and fully prejudiced against all 
other nations, had yet discernment enough to see, 
and candor enough to censure, the cold reserve 
among Englishmen toward strangers (of their own 
nation). 'Sir,' said he, ' two men of any other nation 
who are shown into a room together, at a house 
where they are both visitors, will immediately find 



16 



some conversation. But two Englishmen will prob- 
ably go each to a different window and remain in 
obstinate silence. Sir, we do not, as yet,' proceeded 
the Doctor, ' understand the common rights of 
humanity.' " 

These common rights of humanity of which Dr. 
Johnson speaks are all summed up in the truth 
of man's social equality; that is,' every man's joint 
and equal dependence with every other man upon 
the association of his kind for all that he himself 
is or enjoys. These common rights of humanity 
have got political ratification in England, as they 
have got it nowhere else in Europe out of Switzer- 
land ; but the private life of England, as Dr. John- 
son charges, is shockingly indifferent to them. The 
moral sentiment, the sentiment of what is excep- 
tionally due to this, that, or the other person, utterly 
dominates in that sphere the social sentiment, the 
sentiment of what is habitually due to every man 
as man. It is this unchallenged primacy of the 
moral life over the social life of England, this in- 
tense sensibility among her scholars to personal 
claims over human claims, which so exalts her Phar- 
isaic pride and abases her true spirituality, which 
leaves her outwardly the greatest and inwardly 
the poorest of peoples, and makes the homesick be- 
cause better-nurtured foreigner feel, when exposed 
to it, how dismal and dingy the very heaven of 
heavens would become if once these odiously cor- 
rect and lifeless white-cravatted and black-coated 
respectabilities should get the run of it. 



17 



You see at a glance that this penury of Eng- 
land in all spiritual regards is owing to the simple 
fact that not man, but English-Ymn, is the key-note 
of her aspirations. European thought generally 
and at best is peninsular, — that is, almost insular, — 
in that it regards European culture as constituting 
the probable limits of the human mind. But Eng- 
lish thought is absolutely insular, in that it makes 
England the actual measure of human develop- 
ment. Every Englishman who lives and dies an 
Englishman, that is to say, who has not been made 
by God's grace a partaker in heart of the common- 
wealth of mankind, or a spiritual alien from the 
mother that bore him, believes that not Europe, 
but England itself, one of the smallest corners of 
Europe, as Judaea was one of the smallest corners of 
Asia, furnishes the real Ultima Thiile of human pro- 
gress. This being the key-note of English thought, 
the pitch to which all its tunes are set, you are 
not surprised to see the sentiment dominating the 
whole strain of English character, till at last you 
find the Englishman not only isolating himself from 
the general European man, but each individual 
Englishman becoming a bristling independent un- 
approachable little islet to every other Englishman, 
ready, as Dr. Johnson describes them, to leap out 
of the windows rather than hold that safe and 
salutary parley with each other which God and 
nature urge them to ; so that probably a huger 
amount of painful plethoric silence becomes an- 
nually accumulated under English ribs than befalls 



18 



the whole world beside, and an amount of spirit- 
ual numbness and imbecility generated which is 
not to be paralleled by anything this side of old 
Judaea. And it is exactly the rebound of his thought 
from all this social obstruction and poverty which 
causes the American wayfarer's heart to dance with 
glee when he remembers his own incorrect and 
exceptionable Nazareth, his own benighted but com- 
fortable and unsuspecting fellow-sinners, who are 
said to sit sometimes with their tired feet as hio;h 
as their head, who light their innocent unconscious 
pipes at everybody's fire, and who occasionally, 
when the sentiment of human brotherhood is at 
a white heat in their bosom, ask you, as a gentle- 
man from Cape Cod once asked me at the Astor 
House table, the flxvor of being allowed to put 
his superfluous fat upon your plate, provided, that 
is, the fat is in no way offensive to you. That 
the forms in which human freedom expresses itself 
in these latitudes are open to just criticism in 
many respects, I cordially admit, and even insist; 
but he who sees the uncouth form alone, and has 
no feeling for the beautiful human substance within 
it, for the soul of fellowship that animates and re- 
deems it of all malignity, would despise the shape- 
less embryo because it is not the full-formed man, 
and burn up the humble acorn because it is not 
yet the branching oak. But the letter is nothing, 
the spirit everything. The letter kills, the spirit 
alone gives life ; and it is exclusively to this un- 
deniable spiritual difierence between Europe and 



19 



America, as organized and expressed in our own 
constitutional polity, that all our formal differences 
are owing. Our very Constitution binds us, that 
is to say, the very breath of our political nostrils 
binds us, to disown all distinctions among men, to 
disregard persons, to disallow privilege the most 
established and sacred, to legislate only for the 
common good, no longer for those accidents of 
birth or wealth or culture which spiritually indi- 
vidualize man from his kind, but only for those 
great common features of social want and depend- 
ence which naturally unite him with his kind, and 
inexorably demand the organization of such unity. 
It is this immense constitutional life and inspira- 
tion we are under which not only separate us 
from Europe, but also perfectly explain by antag- 
onism that rabid hostility which the South has al- 
ways shown towards the admission of the North 
to a fair share of government patronage, and which 
now provokes her to the dirty and diabolic struggle 
she is making to give human slavery the sanction 
of God's appointment. 

When I said awhile ago that an American, as such, 
felt himself the peer of every man of woman born, I 
represented my hearers as asking me whether that 
claim was a righteous one ; whether, in fact, he 
whose conscience should practically ratify it in ap- 
plication to himself would not thereby avouch his 
own immodesty, — confess himself devoid of that 
humility which is the life of true manhood. To this 
question I reply promptly, No ! for this excellent 



20 



reason, — that the claim in question is by no means 
a distinctive personal claim, but a claim in behalf of 
every man. When, by virtue of our national gen- 
esis and genius, I claim before God and man a right- 
ful equality with every other man, what precisely is 
it that I do ? Do I claim for myself an equality of 
wit, of learning, of talent, of benevolence, with this, 
that, or the other special person whom you may 
name as remarkable for those endowments ? Do I 
mean to allege my private personal equality with 
all other persons ; my equal claim, for example, to 
the admiring or sympathetic homage of mankind, 
with Shakespeare, with Washington, with Franklin ? 
No man who is not an ass can believe this ; and yet 
you perpetually hear the paid scribes of old-fogyism 
repeating the slander throughout the world, as if it 
were the most indisputable of truths. Nothing is \ 
more common than to hear persons who are disaf- 
fected to the humane temper of our polity affecting 
to quote the Declaration of Independence as saying 
that all men are horn equal, and under cover of 
that audacious forgery exposing it to ridicule. The 
Declaration is guilty of no such absurdity. It 
does not say that all men are born equal, for it 
is notorious that they are born under the greatest 
conceivable inequalities, — inequalities of heart and 
head and hand, — inequalities even of ph^^sical form 
and structure ; but it says that, notwithstanding 
these inequalities, they are all created equal, — that 
is, are all equal before God, or can claim no suj)e- 
rior merit one to another in his sight, being all 



21 



alike dependent upon his power, and possessing 
a precisely equal claim, therefore, each with the 
other, to the blessings of his impartial providence. 
The inequalities under which men are born, or 
which they inherit from their forefathers, are the 
needful condition of their individuality, of their 
various personal identity. The framers of the 
Declaration saw this as well as anybody, but they 
also saw, and so in effect said, that however much 
men may differ among themselves, it was yet not 
these personal differences which commend them to 
each other's true respect, but rather that common 
human want which identifies them all in the Divine 
regard by making them all equal retainers of His 
sovereign bounty. No man not a fool can gainsay 
this, and no man not a fool, consequently, can 
pretend that when I urge this constitutional doc- 
trine of human equality I have anythin-g whatever 
to say of myself personally regarded, or as discrimi- 
nated from other persons, but only as socially regard- 
ed, — that is, as united with all other jDcrsons. In 
short, it is not a claim urged on my own behalf 
alone, but in behalf of every other man who is 
too ignorant or too debased by convention to assert 
it for himself 

Our political Constitution, like every other great 
providential stride in human affairs, was intention- 
ally educative ; was designed to gather us together 
under the discipline of well-disposed but often sore- 
ly tried and disheartened political guides, in order 
finally to draw us fully forth out of the land of dark- 



22 



ness and the house of bondage. The sole great aim 
of our poUtical Constitution has been gradually to 
induct us out of errors and evils, which no Pagan 
Jew was ever more slow and reluctant to susj)ect 
than we are, into a new and far more grandly 
human consciousness, into a land of everlasting 
righteousness and peace. Not one of its literal 
framers ever had the faintest foresight of its ulti- 
mate scientific destination, any more than Moses had 
of the Messiah whom he prefigured ; any more than 
Isaiah or Jeremiah had of the tremendous spiritual 
scope of the prophecies which uttered themselves 
through their rapt and dizzy imaginations. The 
scientific promise of our polity is only to be under- 
stood by watching its practical unfolding, by observ- 
ing the expansive influence it has hitherto exerted, 
and is now more than ever exerting, upon the pop- 
ular mind and upon the popular heart. View it 
either positively or negatively, its influence is the 
same. In its negative aspect, — its aspect toward 
Egypt, which is the European conception of man's 
true state on earth, — it denies all absoluteness both 
to persons and institutions, by boldly resolving what 
is the highest of personalities, namely, the king, 
and what is the most sacred of institutions, namely, 
the Church, both alike from a power into the 
servant of a power, from a righteousness into the 
symbol of a righteousness, from a substance into 
the shadow of a substance ; this substance itself 
being those great disregarded instincts of human 
unity or fraternity which all along the course of 



23 



history have been patiently soliciting scientific rec- 
ognition, in order to put on organic form and cover 
the earth with holiness and peace. In its positive 
aspect, — the aspect it bears toward Canaan, — 
which means the supremacy of man's associated 
life over his individual one, it makes my private 
righteousness, or that which inwardly relates me 
to God, utterly posterior to, and dependent upon, 
my public righteousness, or that which relates me 
to my fellow-man. How is it possible, therefore, 
that its practical effect should be otherwise than 
educative, — educative, too, in the very profoundest 
manner, that is, out of all evil into all good ? Its 
direct influence is to modify or enlarge my private 
conscience, the consciousness I have of myself as a 
moral being, a being independent of my kind and 
capable of all manner of arrogant presumptuous 
private hope toward God, into a public conscience, 
into a consciousness of myself as above all things 
a social being most intimately and indissolubly one 
with my kind, and incapable therefore of any 
blessing which they do not legitimately share. It 
laughs at the pretensions of any person however 
reputable, and of any institution however vener- 
able, to claim an absolute divine sanctity, — that 
is, a sanctity irrespective of his or its unaftected 
human worth ; and it gradually so inflames the mind 
with its own august spiritual meaning, so quickens 
it with its own vivid and palpitating divine sub- 
stance, that the conscience which is governed by it 
of necessity finds itself regenerating, finds itself 



24 



expanding from a petty drivelling and squeaking 
witness of one's own righteousness, into the clear 
and ringing and melodious testimony of God's sole 
righteousness in universal man. 

The European priest and king were at best only 
theoretically perfect, both alike having always been 
actually below the spirit of their great office. Their 
office was purely ministerial and typical, while they 
themselves had always the stupidity to regard it 
as magisterial and final, as constituting in fact its 
own end. The office of the Christian priesthood 
has always been to typify the spotless inward pu- 
rity, the office of the Christian royalty to typify 
the boundless outward power, which, by virtue of 
the Incarnation, or of God's personal indwelling in 
human nature, shall one day characterize universal 
man. Every man's heart and mind, by reason of 
their infinite source, insatiably crave, the one that 
perfect righteousness which is peace towards God, 
the other that perfect knowledge which is com- 
mand over Nature. And the priest and the king 
have existed only to authenticate this insatiate 
longing, and formally prefigure its eventual exact 
fulfilment. European culture accordingly was estab- 
lished upon this typical and transitory basis of 
Church and State, the one representing the infi- 
nite Divine righteousness which is incarnated in 
universal man ; the other the infinite Divine power 
which is engendered of such righteousness.''' But 
no actual churchman and no actual statesman ever 

* See Appendix B. 



25 



grasped the grand humanitary prophecy of his 
office. Each supposed his office to be absolutely, 
not representatively, sacred ; supposed it to be valid 
in itself, and not solely for its uses to the social 
development of the race. The priest claimed for 
the Church an absolute divine sanctity, a sanctity 
irrespective of the education it ministered to the 
popular heart ; and the king claimed for the State 
an absolute divine authority, an authority unde- 
rived from the elevation it afforded to the popular 
thought : so that the sum of European culture in a 
religious way has scarcely amounted to anything 
more than a practical desecration of the priestly 
office, or a secularizing of the Church by a diffu- 
sion of the priestly prerogative among the laity ; 
as the sum of its political progress has consisted 
in limiting the royal prerogative, or democratizing 
the government, by diffusing it among the people. 
In short, Protestantism and constitutional liberty 
are the topmost waves of European progress, the 
bound beyond which European thought cannot le- 
gitimately go, — the one denying the Church as an 
absolute Divine substance, the other denying the 
State as an absolute Divine form. No overt aim is 
there practised towards a positive realization of the 
idea embodied in our institutions, which is that of a 
perfect human society or fellowship, in which every 
member shall be alike sacred before God and alike 
privileged before man. The ingrained inveterate 
Pharisaism of the English mind is so frankly obtuse 
to the conception of a Divine or universal righteous- 



26 



nfess on the earth, and the complacent Sadduceeism 
of Continental thought begets such an indifference 
to that great expectation, that one can see no hope 
for Europe socially but in the absorption of her 
effete nationalities by a new Northern invasion, and 
the consequent infusion of a ruddier blood into the 
veins of her languid populations. 

But however this may be, we in this hemi- 
sphere, at all events, have no European j)roblems 
to solve, and are not called upon in any manner to 
repeat the European experience. We inherit the so- 
lution which Europe has already given to her own 
peculiar problems, and start upon our distinctive 
career from the basis of her most approved expe- 
rience. Europe has made religion an affair of the 
laity as much as of the clergy ; government, an 
affair of the people as much as of the aristocracy. 
' We inherit her ripest culture in both of these farticulars. 
We inherit Protestantism and constitutional liber- 
ty ; but there is this vast difference between us and 
them, loe begin tvhere they leave off. Like all heirs, we 
enter upon a full fruition of the estate which it 
cost them their best blood to found and mature. 
Thus Protestantism is not to us the bright expan- 
sive heaven to which all thdr religious aspiration 
ascends. It is rather the solid, compact, somewhat 
dingy and disagreeable earth upon which our 
feet are planted, only in order to survey entirely 
new and infinitely more inviting heavens. And 
constitutional liberty is not the welcome haven to 
us it has ever been to them, is not to us the same 



27 



broad protective anchorage to which, over weary 
wastes of ocean and through alternate sickening 
calm and driving tempest, their political bark has 
been always steering. It is, on the contrary, our 
port of departure, whence with swelling sails we 
confidently voyage forth to tempt unknown seas, 
and lay open lands as yet untrodden by human 
feet. Protestantism vacates the priestly pretension, 
by turning religion into an affair of the congrega- 
tion. We applaud this, but go further, in mak- 
ing religion an affair of the individual conscience 
exclusively, with which neither priest nor congre- 
gation has the least right to intermeddle. So con- 
stitutional liberty, which is the European ideal of 
liberty, vacates the divine right of kings, by com- 
plicating the royal power with numerous cunning 
constitutional checks and balances. But the liber- 
ty we assert, or which constitutes our ideal, does 
not flow from any man-made constitution under 
heaven, but is one on the contrary which all such 
constitutions are bound under fatal penalties sim- 
ply and servilely to reflect, being the liberty which 
is identical with the God-made constitution of the 
human mind itself, and which consists in the in- 
alienable right of every man to believe according 
to the unbribed inspiration of his own heart, and 
to act according to the unperverted dictates of his 
own understanding. In short, they affirm the in- 
alienable sanctity and freedom of the nation as 
against other nations ; we, the inalienable sanctity 
and freedom of the subject as against the nation. 



28 



They say that every nation is sacred by virtue of 
its nationahty, or has an inviolable title to the 
respect and homage of all other nations. We say 
that every man is similarly sacred by virtue of his 
humanity, and has an inviolable title to the love 
and respect of all other men. Thus they truly 
assert the Divine Incarnation in humanity ; but 
they limit it to the public sphere of life, to the 
national will and the national intelligence. We 
do this, but we do much more also, for we prac- 
tically ratify the Incarnation as a private no less 
than a public truth, as sanctifying the individual 
life indeed far more profoundly than the common 
one. They laugh at us because we set the pulpit 
to the tune of the streets, and expect our gover- 
nors to reflect the wisdom of the farm-yard and 
the factory. But this is because they do not know 
that we, unlike themselves, are without ecclesias- 
tical and political conscience, our very Church and 
State being themselves exclusively human and so- 
cial. We are no mere civil polity, designed, like 
those of the Old World, to lead men out of bar- 
barism into civilization. On the contrary, we find 
them citizens, and out of citizens aspire to make 
them men. We are at bottom nothing more and 
nothing less than a broad human society or broth- 
erhood, of which every man is in full membership 
by right of manhood alone ; and what we seek to 
do is to turn our nominal Church and State into 
the unlimited service of this society. In fact, we 
declare the childhood of the race forever fairly past, 



29 



and its manhood at least entered upon. We deny 
the abihtj of any church, Cathohc or Protestant, 
to sanctify any human being, or even enhance the 
sanctity he derives from his creative source. We 
deny the abihty of any government, arbitrary or 
constitutional, to enfranchise the human mind, or 
even enhance the freedom which inheres in its 
God-given constitution. We maintain, on the con- 
trary, that the Church can only and at best de- 
velop the righteousness which every man derives 
in infinite measure from God ; and that the State 
can only and at best promote the freedom which 
Divinely inheres in his very form as man : so 
leaving every man's religion to the sole inspiration 
of the Divine Good in his own heart, every man's 
freedom to the sole arbitrament of the Divine 
Truth in his own understanding. In short, we 
practically affirm the literal verity of the Divine 
Incarnation in every form of human nature, the 
unlimited indwelling of the infinite Godhead in 
every man of woman born ; so turning every man 
by the sheer pith of his manhood into mitred 
priest and crowned king, or avouching ourselves 
finally to our own consciousness and the world's 
willing recognition as a faultless human society, 
instinct with God's unspeakable delight and appro- 
bation.* 

Such, my friends, I conceive to be our undeniable 
inward siornificance as a nation. Such the bright 
consummate flower of manhood, which is spiritually 

* See Appendix C 



30 



disengaging itself from the coarse obscuring husks 
of our literal Democracy, consisting in the gradual 
but complete subjugation of the selfish instinct in 
our bosoms to the service of the social instinct. 
Such is the great and righteous temper of mind 
to which we are Divinely begotten ; such the pa- 
ternal animating spirit that shapes our constitu- 
tional polity, that originally gave us birth as a na- 
tion, and that even now, in this day of seeming 
adversity, gives us a conscience of rectitude and 
invincible might which is itself incomparably richer 
than all prosperity. It is idle to talk, — as silly 
people, however, will talk, as all people will talk 
whose gross grovelling hearts go back to the flesh-pots 
of Egypt, when they eat bread to the full, — it is idle to 
talk of our political troubles as springing up out 
of the ground, as having no graver origin than 
party fanaticism or folly. These troubles, on the 
contrary, are the inevitable fruit of our very best 
growth, the sure harbingers, I am persuaded, of 
that rising Sun of Righteousness whose beams shall 
never again know eclipse. They are merely an 
evidence, on a larger scale and in a public sphere, 
of the discord which every righteous man perceives 
at some time or other to exist between his essen- 
tial human spirit and his perishable animal flesh. 
For every nation is in human form, is in foct but an 
aggregate or composite form of manhood, greatly 
grander and more complex than the simple forms 
of which it is made up, but having precisely the 
same intense unity within itself, and claiming, like 



31 



each of them, a quickening controUing spirit, and 
an obedient servile body. This animating control- 
hng spirit of our national polity, like that of our 
own private souls, is Divine, comes from God ex- 
clusively, and is only revealed never exhausted, 
only embodied or empowered never belittled or 
enfeebled, by the literal symbols in which human 
wisdom contrives to house it. That part of the 
letter of our Constitution which best reveals the 
majestic human spirit that animates our polity is 
of course its preamble. But the real divinity of 
the nation, its vital imperishable holiness, resides 
not in any dead parchment, but only in the right- 
eous unselfish lives of those who see in any con- 
stitution but the luminous letter of their inward 
spiritual faith, but the visible altar of their invisible 
worship, and rally around it therefore w^ith the 
joyous unshrinking devotion not of slaves but of 
men. 

Now, such being the undoubted spirit of our 
polity, what taint was there in its material consti- 
tution, in our literal maternal inheritance, to affront 
this righteous paternal spirit and balk its rich prom- 
ise, by turning us its children from an erect sincere 
hopeful and loving brotherhood of men intent upon 
universal aims, into a herd of greedy luxurious 
swine, into a band of unscrupulous political adven- 
turers and sharpers, the stink of whose corruption 
pervades the blue spaces of ocean, penetrates Eu- 
rope, and sickens every struggling nascent human 
hope with despair? 



32 



The answer leaps at the ears ; it is Slavery, and 
Slavery only. This is the poison which lurked al- 
most harmless at first in our body politic, and to 
which its rio;hteous soul is an utter stransrer : this 
is the curse we inherited from the maternal Eng- 
lish Eve out of whose somewhat loose lascivious 
lap we sprung. But of late years the poison has 
grown so rank and pervasive, making its citadel, 
indeed, the very heart of the commonwealth, or 
those judicial and legislative chambers whence all 
the tides of its activity proceed, that each succes- 
sive political administration of the .country j^roves 
more recreant to humanity than its predecessor, 
until at last we find shameless God-forsaken men, 
holding high place in the government, become so 
rabid with its virus as to mistake its slimy purulent 
ooze for the ruddy tide of life, and commend its 
foul and fetid miasm to us as the fragrant breath 
of assured health. It is easy enough to falsify the 
divinity which is shaping our constitutional action, 
wherever a will exists to do so. Men whose most 
cherished treasure can be buttoned up in their 
breeches pocket, and whose heart, of course, is with 
their treasure, are doubtless panting to convince 
the country that we have already done enough 
for honor, and the sooner a sham peace is hurried 
up the better. It only needs a wily wolf of this 
sort to endue himself here and there in sheep's 
clothing, and bleat forth a cunning pathetic lament 
over the causeless misfortunes which have befallen 
our bread-and-butter interests, to see dozens of 



33 



stupid sheep taking up in their turn the sneaking 
hypocritical bleat, and prej)aring their innocent 
fleece for his dishonest remorseless shears. The 
friends of Mammon, are numerous in every commu- 
nity ; but, blessed be God, they nowhere rule in the 
long run. They are numerous enough to give an 
odious flavor to the broth; but they never consti- 
tute its body. It is impossible that we should err 
in this great crisis of our destiny, a crisis to which 
that of our national birth or independence yields 
in dignity and importance, as much as body yields 
to soul, flesh to spirit, childhood to manhood. For 
this is the exact crisis we are in ; the transition 
from youth to manhood, from appearance to reality, 
from passing shadow to deathless substance. Every 
man and every nation of men encounters some- 
where in its progress a critical hour, big with all 
its future fate; and woe be to the man, woe be 
to the nation, who believes that this sacred re- 
sponsibility can be trifled with. To every man- 
and to every nation it means eternal life or eter- 
nal death ; eternal liberty or eternal law ; the 
heaven of free spontaneous order, or the hell of 
enforced prudential obedience. There is no man 
who hears me who does not know somethinsr of 

o 

this bitter sweat and agony ; whose petty trivial 
cares have not been dignified and exalted by some 
glimpse of this hidden inward fight ; who has not 
at times heard the still small voice of truth on 
the one hand counselling him to do the right 
thing though ruin yawn upon his hopes, — coun- 

5 



34 



selling him to force himself to do the honest thing 
though it cost him tears of blood, — and the earth- 
quake voice of hell on the other, or the fiery 
breath of passion infuriated by long starvation, 
doing its best to drown and devour it. Our na- 
tional life, believe me, is at that exact pass in 
this awful moment, and nowhere else. It is the 
hour of our endless rise into all beautiful human 
proportions, into all celestial vigor and beatitude, 
or of our endless decline into all infernality and 
uncleanness, and into the inevitable torments which 
alone discipline such uncleanness. And we must 
not hesitate for a moment to fight it manfully 
out to its smiling blissful end, feeling that it is 
not our own battle alone, that we are not fight- 
ing for our own country only, for our own altars 
and firesides as men have fought hitherto, but for 
the altars and firesides of universal man, for the 
ineradicable riorhts of human nature itself Let 
bloated European aristocracies rejoice in our calam- 
ities ; let the mutton-headed hereditary legislators 
of Eno:land raise a shout of insult and exultation 
over our anticipated downfall \ the honest, unso- 
phisticated masses everywhere will do us justice, 
for they will soon see, spite of all efforts to blind 
them, that we occupy in this supreme moment no 
petty Thermopylae guarding some paltry Greece, 
but the broad majestic pass that commands the 
deathless wealth and worth of human nature itself, 
the ThermopyliB of the human mind ; they will 
soon see, in fact, that our flags are waving, our 



35 



trumpets sounding, our cannon showering their 
deathful hail, not merely to avenge men's out- 
raged political faith and honor, but to vindicate 
the inviolable sanctity of the human form itself, 
which for the first time in history is Divinely 
bound up with that faith and honor. 

This is the exact truth of the case. The political 
tumble-down we have met with is no accident, 
as unprincipled politicians would represent it. It 
is the fruit of an inevitable expansion of the human 
mind itself, of an advancing social consciousness 
in the race, an ever-widening sense of human unity, 
which will no long-er be content with the old chan- 
nels of thought, the old used-up clothes of the 
mind, but irresistibly demands larger fields of spec- 
ulation, freer bonds of intercourse and fellowship). 
We have only frankly to acknowledge this great 
truth in order to find the perturbation and anxi- 
ety which now invade our unbelieving bosoms dis- 
pelled ; in order to hear henceforth, in every tone 
of the swelling turbulence that fills our borders, 
no longer forebodings of disease, despair, and death, 
but prophecies of the highest health, of kindling 
hope, of exuberant righteousness, and endless feli- 
city for every man of woman born. " I was once," 
says an old writer, "I was once in a numerous 
crowd of spirits, in which everything appeared at 
sixes and sevens : they complained, saying that 
now a total destruction was at hand, for in that 
crowd nothing appeared in consociation, but every- 
thing loose and confused, and this made them fear 



36 



destruction, which they supposed also would be 
total. But in the midst of their confusion and 
disquiet, I perceived a soft sound, angelically sweet, 
in which was nothing but what was orderly. The 
angelic choirs thus present were within or at the 
centre, and the crowd of persons to whom ap- 
pertained what was disorderly were without or at 
the circumference. This flowing angelic melody 
continued a long time, and it was told me that 
hereby was signified how the Lord rules confused 
and disorderly things which are upon the surface, 
namely, hy virtue of a 'pacific iwinciple in the deptJis 
or at the centre ; ivhereby the disorderly things upon the 
surface are reduced to order, each being restored from 
the error of its nature!' The pacific and restorative 
principle which in the same way underlies all our 
political confusion and disorder, and which will 
irresistibly shape our national life to its own right- 
eous and orderly issues, is the rising sentiment of 
human society or fellowshij), the grand, invincible 
faith of man's essential unity and brotherhood. 
The social conscience, the conscience of what is 
due to every man as man, having the same divine 
origin and the same divine destiny with all other 
men, is becoming preternaturally quicTcened in our 
bosoms, and woe betide the church, woe betide 
the state, that ventures to say to that conscience, 
Thus far shalt thou go, and no further ! 

Slavery has this incredible audacity. Slavery, 
which is the only institution of our European in- 
heritance we have left unmodified, conh'onts and 



37 

spits upon this rising tide of God's righteousness 
in the soul of man. Slavery boldly denies what 
all our specific culture affirms, namely, the invio- 
lable sanctity of human affection in every form, 
the inviolable freedom of human thought in every 
direction. The cultivated intelligence of the race 
abhors the claim of any human being to possess 
an aUolute property in any other being, that is, a 
property unvivified by the other's unforced, spon- 
taneous gift. Slavery affirms this diabohc preten- 
sion, — affirms the unqualified title of the master to 
outrage, if need be, the sacredest instincts of nat- 
ural affection in the slave, and to stifle at need 
his feeblest intellectual expansion. Accordingly, the 
heart of man, inspired by God and undepraved by 
Mammon, pronounces slavery with no misgiving an 
unmitigated infamy; and the intelligence of man, 
thence enhghtened, declares that its empire shall 
not be extended. We have no right to say that 
evil shall not exist where it already does exist 
without our privity ; but we have not only all 
manner of right, both human and divine, to say 
that its existence shall not be promoted by our 
active connivance; it is our paramount wisdom as 
men, and our paramount obligation as citizens, to 
say so. Such, at all events, is our exact social 
attitude with respect to slavery. Every unsophis- 
ticated soul of man feels it to be what it actually 
is, namely, the ultimate or most general form and 
hence the king of all the evil pent up in human 
nature; so that when it once disappears by the 



38 



clear indignant refusal of the human mind any 
longer actively to co-operate with it, all those inte- 
rior and subtler shapes of evil which now infest 
us, and are held together by it as the viscera of 
the body are held together by the skin, will be 
dissipated along with it. We know not when the 
hour of this great salvation shall strike. We only 
know that as God is just and sovereign it must 
strike erelong, and that when it does strike the 
morning stars of a richer creation than has yet 
been seen on earth will sing together, and all the 
sons of God in every subtlest ineffable realm of his 
dominion shout for joy. Our government itself is 
waking up from its long trance ; is beginning to 
perceive that there is something sacreder than com- 
merce on earth, — that the interests of this very 
commerce, in fact, will best be promoted by first 
of all recognizing that there are depths in the hu- 
man soul, demands of immaculate righteousness and 
assured peace, which all the pecuniary prosperity 
. of the world can never satisfy. In short, the gov- 
ernment is fast coming, let us hope, to a conscious- 
ness of its distinctively social or human function, 
by practically confessing that its supreme respon- 
sibility is due only to man, and no longer to per- 
sons, or infuriated sectional exactions. Of course, 
in pursuing this career, it will become gradually 
converted from the mere tool it has hitherto been 
for adroit political knaves to do what they please 
with, into a grandly social force, reflecting every 
honest human want, fulfilling every upright human 



39 

aspiration. What matters it, then, if we forfeit the 
empty poHtical prestige we have hitherto enjoyed 
with European statesmen ? Let us only go on overt- 
ly to inaugurate that promised perfect society on 
earth, all whose officers shall be peace, and its sole 
exactors righteousness, by practically acknowledging 
on all occasions the infinite Divine Good enshrined 
in man's heart, the infinite Divine Truth enthroned 
in his understanding, and we shall fast attain to 
a social standing in the eyes of European peoj)les 
which shall grandly compensate our mere political 
disasters, and do more to modify the practice of 
European statesmen themselves than anything else 
we could possibly do. 

In this state of things, how jealously should we 
watch the Congress to-day assembling at Washing- 
ton ! How clear should be the watchword we 
telegraph to guide their deliberations! Have we 
indeed no higher monition for our legislature than 
old heathen Rome supplied to hers, namely, to see 
that the RepuUic svfer no damage? The body is 
much, but it is not the soul. The Republic is 
much, but it is not all. It is much as a means, 
but nothing as an end. It is much as a means 
to human advancement, but nothing as its con- 
summation. It is much as an onward march of 
the race, it is nothing whatever as its final victory 
and rest. Let us be sure that, so far as we are 
concerned, our legislators understand this. Let 
them know that we value the Republic so much, 
only because we value man more; that we value 



40 



peace, prosperity, and wealth not as ends, but as 
means to an end, which is justice, truth, and mer- 
cy, in which alone man's real peace, his true pros- 
perity, and his abiding wealth reside, and which 
will be ours only so long as we are faithful to the 
gospel of human freedom and equality. For my 
part, if I thought that our rulers were going to 
betray in this agonizing hour the deathless interest 
confided to them, — if I thought that Mr. Lincoln 
and Mr. Seward were going at last to palter with 
the sublime instincts of peace and righteousness 
that elevated them to power and give them all their 
personal prestige, by making the least conceivable 
further concession to the obscene demon of Slavery, 
— then I could joyfully see Mr. Lincoln and Mr. 
Seward scourged from the sacred eminence they 
defile, yea more, could joyfully see our boasted 
political house itself laid low in the dust forever, 
because in that case its stainless stars and stripes 
w^ould have sunk from a banner of freemen into a 
dishonored badge of the most contemptible people 
on earth ; a people that bartered away the fairest 
spiritual birthright any people ever yet were born 
to, for the foulest mess of material pottage ever 
concocted of shameless lust and triumphant fraud. 



APPENDIX. 



A. — Page 10. 



This able but unscrupulous paper is an involuntary and therefore 
most reliable witness of the utter worthlessness, for all social purposes, of 
the extremest culture of the head, which is moral culture, when weighed 
against the slenderest culture of the heart, which alone is spiritual culture. 
It seems to have had no more genuine mission than to show the rank and 
festering selfishness which has eaten out the vitals of the old European 
decency, coming now at last to the surface to corrode and consume every 
traditional usage of humane and sympathetic literary art which has hith- 
erto masked its presence and limited its activity. If the Saturday Eeview 
fairly represent the scholarly animus of England, — if its flippant, trans- 
parent Pharisaism, its puerile self-complacency, its wanton insolence, its 
truculent arrogance, exhibited toward every form of intellectual indepen- 
dence, — except, as in the case of John Mill, where a great reputation sanc- 
tifies it, — and toward every the most honest suggestion of social advance, 
fitly represent the academical consciousness of that country, — one can 
only exclaim, Alas ! how changed fi-om its former self ! A land (in an intel- 
lectual sense) of deserts and pits, a land of drought and the shadow of death, 
a land no man passes through, and where no man dwells. Certainly honest 
John Bull was never before so sophisticated,— degraded from a fat savory 
succulent juicy beef, to a lean stringy sinewy tendinous veal, — from the 
superb contented disdainful monarch of broad meadows and ghttering 
streams, to the blatant and menacing and butting challenger of every in- 
nocent scarlet rag that flutters along private lane or pubUc highway. It 
is English middle-class manners made conscious of their own inmost snob- 
bery, and trying to cover it up under an affectation of coarse and vulgar 
effrontery towards superior people. 
6 



42 



B. — Page 24. 

The State as a civil polity is wholly contingent upon the Church as 
an ecclesiasticism. Thus, throughout European history you see the Chris- 
tian priest uniformly consecrating the Christian king. In the earlier in- 
fantile or Catholic centuries this beautiful ritual had some tender human 
significance ; but it is now a senseless ceremonial. In modern Europe, 
just as in old Judaja, the Church no longer preserves its spiritual priority 
to the State, but has fallen contentedly behind it ; the pure feminine 
heart of the world succumbing everywhere to the needs of its corrupt 
lordly head. The great Napoleon, animated with the spirit and armed 
with the prestige of the Revolution, felt so sheer a contempt for this friv- 
olous European priesthood and its lapsed prerogative, that he did not hes- 
itate at his coronation to snatch the coronet of the Empress Josephine from 
the hands of the officiating priest and place it himself on her brow ; thus 
clearly proclaiming, by a great symbolic act infinitely beyond his own be- 
sotted thought, two things : — 1. That the veil of the temple, which had 
hitherto shut out the people from the holy of holies, was now actually as 
well as typically rent ; thus, that the age of types and shadows had ex- 
pired by its own limitation, and that man stood henceforth face to face 
with spiritual substance, with eternal realities : 2. That upon whomsoever 
the people should confer sovereignty, they conferred sanctity as well, or 
that in the elect of the people, as he claimed to be, priest and king, good- 
ness and truth, right and might, should be indlssolubly blent. And 
you now see the present Najioleon diligently finishing up what his prede- 
cessor began, that is to say, depriving the first clergyman in Europe of 
all right to his slenderest remaining foothold upon her soil ; so that the 
Papacy will erelong come as near as possible to justifying the theologic 
fiction of disembodied existences, and sink, like those curious remains of 
the early Jiora and fauna of the earth which we treasure in museums, 
into a mere fossil memorial to future ages of the giant size to which, in 
the infancy of society, men's imbecility and presumption in respect to 
Divine things had attained. 

The Church with us is of course exposed to no such coarse imperial 
insult, as the State is exposed to no such brutal revolutionarj- invasion. 
Wliy ? Simply because our Church and State are both of them purely 
social institutions, or have no proju^r life apart from the uses they promote 
to the great society which maintains thorn. Our Church admits of all 
manner of sectarian diversity ; our State is the fusion of all manner of na- 
tional oppugnancles : because the only altar of God we recognize are the 



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